April 8, 2008

A clever collection of verbal comebacks has been published by Mardy Grothe and it's titled: Viva La Repartee. Very funny stuff. Here is one:

W. C. Fields



W. C. Fields died at age sixty-seven on December 25, 1946, his life cut short by his notorious alcohol consumption (by some accounts, he drank as much as two quarts of gin a day). Some wags thought it was a fitting irony that Fields died on Christmas, the one holiday he despised the most. As he lay in his hospital bed shortly before his death, Fields was visited by the actor Thomas Mitchell, a good friend. When Mitchell entered Fields' room, he was shocked to find the irreligious Fields paging through a Bible. Fields was a lifelong agnostic, and fervently anti-religious (he once said that he had skimmed the Bible while looking for movie plots, but found only "a pack of wild lies"). "What are you doing reading a Bible?" asked the astonished Mitchell. A wiseacre to the end, Fields replied:

"I'm looking for loopholes."

and speaking of clever repartees, here is a great one from the movie DINNER AT EIGHT. The two ladies in case you don't know are Marie Dressler and Jean Harlow.

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